My newsletter has 412 subscribers and I've stopped chasing the number
I run a small letter, once a month, and about a year ago I stopped sending it to the whole list. Now roughly half of it goes out in the post, printed on the same paper stock I use for my study sheets, folded, hand addressed. It costs me a fortune in postage and an afternoon I could spend painting.
The reply rate is around thirty percent. The email version gets maybe two percent.
What those replies actually contain: a woman in Devon asking what blue I use in the shadows of white flowers, a retired pharmacist who noticed I'd labelled a specimen with the wrong collection date, a teacher who wanted the whole letter in the classroom. None of that happens by email. Email replies are "lovely, thank you." The envelope gets a letter back.
The part I did not expect is what it does to my teaching. Everyone tells you to grow the list, run the free download, build the funnel. I did the arithmetic and it says the opposite. Four hundred people who open an envelope are worth more than four thousand who open a tab, and I cannot explain that to anyone selling me a course on audience growth.
I am not recommending this. It is expensive, it does not scale, and I am fairly sure it will never make me a name people recognise at a market stall. I just know which version of my work is actually reaching someone, and it is the one with a stamp on it.
4
6commentsSaveFollow threadShare
the pharmacist catching the wrong collection date is the part that gets me. that's not a reader, that's someone sitting with the thing long enough to check your work against the label. you don't get that from a screen you scroll past.
the thirty percent doesn't surprise me though. paper forces a decision. you have to open it, you have to do something with it, even if the something is throw it away. an email just sits there being not-yet-read forever. i've done the same math on my own stuff and it's always the same answer, the smaller, slower version does more work per person and less work overall. the question i never fully answer is whether less overall is fine. for me it usually is. a fortune in postage is a real number though.
The pharmacist thing, ja, but I'd push a little on why. It isn't the paper. I have had people stand in front of a canvas for twenty minutes and never once look at it. Slowness is not the quality of the surface, it is what the person brings to it, and I think what you are both describing is selection. The list of 412 is mostly people who signed up for a reason they've since forgotten. Print and postage is a filter that costs the sender money and the reader a small decision, and that decision sorts the ones who actually care from the ones who just never unsubscribed. So the thirty percent is not paper doing more work. It is a much smaller number of people doing the same work they always did, while the rest quietly leave the room. Which is fine. Just don't credit the stock.
You're right about the filter, and I'll take the correction on the paper. I'd been giving the stock more credit than it deserves. What the post actually does is make the reader spend something, and spending something forces a decision the email never asks for.
But I'd hold one thing. The pharmacist checking my label against an edition of the flora is selection and effort both, and I don't think you can separate them cleanly. He had to go and find the book. That's the decision you're describing, and it's also the work. The person who stands in front of a canvas for twenty minutes and sees nothing has already decided not to look, before they walked in.
What I've stopped doing is calling the 412 a list. It's a room with a lot of people in it who came for something I no longer remember promising.
The pharmacist wrote back a second time, after I corrected the label, to tell me which edition of the flora I should be checking against. I don't think he'd have bothered over a screen. That's the part I keep returning to: the letter asks something of them, and a few people answer properly.
But I'll push back on one thing. Paper doesn't make anyone look. I've had a printed sheet on the wall at a class, thirty people walk past it, and one asks why the leaf margins are serrated rather than entire. The paper didn't do that. The person did. The paper just made it slightly more awkward to ignore.